


from my skin to my bones

by ahbonjour



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Angus is a fancy horse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, but what else is new, taako is not good at feelings, talking about feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 09:44:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10303817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahbonjour/pseuds/ahbonjour
Summary: The boychik freaks Taako out in a way that few do, unsettling him off of his carefully constructed personality and turning him into a, gods he hates to say it, detective. Why does Angus trot? Why does he call Taako ‘sir’?Why does Angus care about them?During Lunar Interlude III, before LUP but post magic-lessons-starting.





	

Angus trots.

It’s an odd little thing that Taako has noticed about the World’s Greatest (Boy) Detective—he doesn’t walk to where he’s going, like an adult, or skip like a child, he trots like a fancy horse, arms full of papers or scrolls or magical objects. Angus moves like he’s excited but doesn’t want to show off how excited he is, canters and ambles. It’s endearing. It should be endearing.

“It’s weird, right?” he asks Magnus in the employee cafeteria, watching through the window as Angus trots across the quad. “Like, it’s bizarre-o. Have you ever seen him _walk_?”

Magnus, for his part, isn’t really paying attention. “The kid?”

Taako rolled his eyes. “Yes, the kid.”

“I dunno. I’m sure I’ve seen him walk.” He scratches at a sideburn, bushy brows drawing together. “I _know_ I have.”

“You useless ding-dong,” Taako sighs, standing and dumping his barely-touched food in the garbage.

It’s all he can think about for the next week. During their magic lessons, Angus is like a budgie, all twitter and flight. He’s focused where a bird isn’t, though, able to stand still and wring Taako’s old wand for hours while he tries to produce more hands and more fire. They reflect off his glasses and make Taako feel some kind of way when he looks up with a grin missing a tooth.

“You care about him,” Merle accuses Taako one night.

It takes all of Taako’s power to not roll his eyes out of his head. “ _No_ , I do not,” he insists, “and personally, I’m offended that you would even dare to make such a suggestion. I mean, I do—honestly—the person I care about is _me_.”

“And me,” Magnus insists from the stool next to their fireplace.

“No—”

“And Merle. And Angus.”

“Yeah, you care about me!” Merle says, tickled and giggling. He bats his eyelashes. “Come on, Taako—”

“No. No! Taako cares about number one, baby,” he retorts with a flash of teeth, “and I’ll start caring about you the day you cast a competent healing spell, old man.”

“Well, you still care about me and Angus,” Magnus says in the way Magnus does, rushing in and punching everything in the face, from crystal demons to clay constructs to stupid, vapid arguments that Taako is supposed to win, dammit. “And he cares about you, too.”

“Don’t project your mushy feeling goo onto me,” Taako sneers, flicking his fingers at the man who’d saved his life at least a dozen times over. “It’ll stain my blouse.”

But Taako keeps up with the kid, trading barbs (well, more like handing barbs, as the kid refuses to trade any back) and teaching him spells and _watching_. The boychik freaks him out in a way that few do, unsettling him off of his carefully constructed personality and turning him into a, gods he hates to say it, _detective_. Why does Angus trot? Why does he call Taako ‘sir’?

Why does Angus care about them?

All three of them, but Taako specifically. (To Taako, everything is Taako specifically.) True, Taako was slightly nicer to Angus than Magnus or, gods forbid, Merle; but he’s still not exactly kind to him. He prestidigitated his nose away, he stole his family’s treasured silverware. It doesn’t matter that Angus shouldn’t know these things—he had to know them. World’s Greatest Detective had to have heard the silver clanking in Garfield’s pocket, had to know the gestures for Taako’s favorite cantrip.

So why did Angus still love them? Taako specifically?

Taako is really starting to resent all the time he spends thinking about this ridiculousness, how much of him is consumed by staring at his striking star-covered boots as he walks the hallways of the dome, rubbing his chin under the too-star-filled-sky. He’s wrapped up, and when he’s wrapped up he can’t handle being sneaked up on.

What makes it worse is that no one is directly behind him, just a sneaky little mage hand reaching up and tugging on his ear. The hand is not as well-controlled as it could be and it tugs too hard, making Taako bend slightly and snap out of his reverie in an extremely unpleasant way.

It _startles_ him—it really does—and he whips a hand out to the side too fast with a shout of “Fuck!” and jumps and looks at the person who did it in anger, why did they sneak up like that, why did they touch Taako without permission—and he freezes.

He only sees Angus’s eyes for a split second, wide and brown. Angus, tiny Angus who is only barely taller than Merle and a quarter of his girth, pitches forward with his back wound tight like a spring, hands flying up to cover his neck and body curling to protect itself as best as it can. He is beginning to shake and Taako wonders, for a horrible moment, if he’d accidentally struck the kid, but his own hand would be hurting, too, and it’s not. It feels better than his gut does, churning like a black ink sea, his ears ringing as he remembers—

_“Oh, good one, sirs!” the tiny elf boy says, only barely taller than the shortest member of the troupe and a quarter of his girth. The elf’s arms are full of ladles or scrolls or groceries, all twitter and flight. His teeth flash and his hands move like they’re entities of their own, able to concentrate for hours on one stew in the back of a wagon, able to fly just as quickly to protect his neck._

_“We don’t pay you to brown nose,” a clown grunts._

_“Yes, sirs,” the elf boy says, ducking his head and letting his hair cover the shining bruise under his eye. “Sorry, sirs.”_

—Taako breathes, Taako gasps, Taako tries to push that away and back to where it _belongs_. He pushes away when he became the man he is, when he lost someone who loved him and put a spoon in his hand for the first time, and when he lost someone as inconsequential as salt, as rosemary, as elderberries, and he breathes and realizes Angus is talking.

“—thought it would be funny, a good good goof, I thought since you and Magnus and Merle goof on each other, and on me, sir, it might be funny, I’m so sorry, sir, I’m so sorry—”

Taako breathes. Taako breathes and kneels. He breathes and kneels and keeps his eyes open. “Angus.”

“—please don’t stop teaching me, please, it was an accident and a goof and I love you and I don’t want you to stop teaching me, I’m learning and I won’t do it again, I promise, I swear—”

“Angus.” Taako’s voice is quieter than he’d like, but he’s afraid to clear his throat. When did he become afraid? “I’m going to touch your shoulder.”

Angus is quiet for a long second, then lowers his arm and lets Taako touch his shoulder, hand sliding up to rest comfortably on his cheek. Angus is hiccupping and crying, he hates crying. It makes him feel like a baby. He swipes at the tears. “Sorry, sir.”

Taako remembers when he lost the way he was. He doesn’t want Angus to lose the way he is. “You wanna go steal some of Merle’s fantasy Ben & Jerry’s?”

Angus is shocked for a second, but then a laugh bubbles through the tears. “Will he mind?”

“I doubt it. I’ll tell him to pick up more on the way back.”

“But what about the magic lesson?”

“ _Fuck_ the magic lesson, kiddo.”

Angus laughs a bit more, a bit louder, but when Taako moves his hand up to run it through the boy’s dark curls the tears burst out of him and he pushes himself into Taako’s arms, into his unwilling heart, rooting himself there until Taako says, “Okay, pumpkin, c’mon. You’re gonna stain the blouse.”

 

Merle does pick up more ice cream, but when he comes back, Taako and Angus are already asleep on the couch together, spoons clattered together on the coffee table, melted ice cream dripping onto the hardwood.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from 'Runaway' by Ed Sheeran.
> 
> Find me on Tumblr @ahbonjour!


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